1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to systems and methods of improving device service actions. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for dynamically ranking service actions for complex machines.
2. Background
User expectations for electronic systems have increased over the years. Users expect electronic systems, such as printing systems, to be more reliable, produce more output more quickly and at a higher quality, and support more applications with the introduction of each new product. As a result, the complexity of such systems has increased.
When an electronic system requires service, users require that such downtime be minimized as much as possible. However, the increased complexity of electronic systems makes diagnosing faults and maintaining such systems more challenging. For example, technical service representatives (or other users) are required to have a higher level of skill to handle such faults, and service manuals require an increased level of detail to identify possible causes for each fault.
FIG. 1 depicts an exemplary service description for a fault according to the known art. As shown in FIG. 1, the service description for a fault includes a symptom 105 and a plurality of service actions such as 110a-d. A user performs each service action 110a-d sequentially until a service action resolves the condition causing the fault. For example, if service action 110b resolves the fault condition, service actions 110c and 110d need not be performed. Upon performing a service action, the user responds to the “Y/N” (or other) question, such as 115, denoting whether the fault persists or was solved by performing the service action. Typically, the responses to questions 115 posed to the users are not available for post-service analysis. A service description is typically static until a revised service manual is provided to the user.
As the level of detail for service descriptions has increased, the ability of users to diagnose faults quickly has diminished. Longer service manuals that identify numerous faults and potentially require multiple operations and diagnostic procedures to be performed can make isolating the root cause of a fault a time-consuming process (i.e., cause mean service time for a fault to increase).
Systems and methods for reducing the average time period required to diagnose a problem for an electronic system, for optimizing service descriptions based on service history data, and for distributing service history data to a plurality of users automatically would be desirable.